On the latest Rails Podcast I spoke with Jim Weirich. Jim is a great person and a fantastic programmer. One of his contributions to the Ruby community is the rake build system.

You can use rake to automate all kinds of tasks. And of course, Rails takes advantage of it in a big way. Last summer I automated a few tasks by adding files to the ‘script’ directory. I thought I was being clever by doing a ‘require’ on ‘environment.rb’ and accessing my mode ...

The default rails Installation Instructions walks you though setting up a single Rails application that comprises your entire web site (in other words, the ApplicationRoot is the same as the web server’s DocumentRoot). Perhaps this is all you want.

Frequently, however, you will want a little more flexibility; perhaps you want to integrate your Rails application into an existing web site (with the \ApplicationRoot as a sub-directory of the webserver’s \DocumentRoot). Or may ...

One thing I love about Ruby is the built in unit tests. As someone who is working to use better developing methodologies, having unit testing avaliable with no effort makes it that much easier to try out things like Test Driven Development. Unit testing also has an important place in Rails development. I enjoyed the format of my article on migrations, so we’ll try that again. The why and how of unit testing, coming right up....

Plugins are self-contained libraries made specially for Rails. They are a great way to reuse someone else’s code or to package your own code for reuse.

This is the second of a three part tutorial on writing plugins for Ruby on Rails.

This assumes that you have already created a subversion repository, and you are just wondering how to setup your rails project.

While playing around programming my first ecommerce application with Ruby on Rails, I felt like trying out some serious stuff like integrating PayPal web services and found some good info-threads on Google groups for soap4r and even a test script on the Ruby on Rails wiki. With all this help, I still struggled for a few hours to get things to work and the causes of errors were annoyingly banal (as usual...huh). I had to make some very minor corrections in the test code on the wiki to make the Pa ...

This article is for fellow Rubyists looking for more information on test writing and how that fits into Ruby On Rails. If you’re new to test writing or experienced with test writing, but not in Rails, hopefully you’ll gain some practical tips and insight on successful testing.

The structure is one thing, but what about when I want to automatically create sample data?

Enter fixtures. Fixtures is a fancy word for ‘sample data’. Fixtures allow you to populate your testing database with predefined data before your tests run. Fixtures are database independent and assume one of two formats: YAML or CSV.

The objective of this howto is to write a functional test to verify that a user creation form and action actually creates a user.